1. Banks in most countries finance a large part of their operating costs by charging higher rates of interest on the loans they make than they pay on the deposits they hold. The pioneers of national accounts soon realized that if they calculated the value added for banks in the same way as for other producers, the operating surplus for banks would be very low and even negative. To avoid "the paradox of a prosperous industry showing a negligible positive, or even negative, contribution to the national product"[n.1] the convention was adopted of imputing an additional component of the gross output of banks which consisted of the 'free" services that Banks were assumed to be providing to their customers.

OEEC and 1953 United Nations Systems

2. The first system of accounts developed by the OEEC recommended that these non-market services should be valued as the "excess of investment income accruing to banks over deposit interest accruing to their depositors" and the first United Nations manual on national accounts, which was published in the following year, adopted the same convention.[n.2] These early systems both required that the value of these services should be estimated and should be shown as being purchased by the two sectors─households and businesses─that were assumed to be consuming them. It was considered that all these services were provided to the ^depositors^. Broadly they consiste of services such as cheque clearing and keeping customers informed of their receipts and payments. It is interesting to note that, contrary to the 1993 SNA, these early systems did not regard the tasks that banks undertake in connection with their lending activities as constituting the provision of services to lenders [??; corresponding borrowers ??]; these tasks were presumably seen as intermediate costs of bank production.

3. Both these early systems recommended that the imputed value of bank services should be allocated to households and enterprises, and to different kinds of activities within the enterprise sector, according to the levels of outstanding deposits. If there was information available only on the split between households and enterprises as a whole, the allocation of these services to different kinds of activities should be made on the basis of value added. If there was no information at all on the ownership of deposits, the whole amount of what commonly called "imputed bank service charges" was to be allocated to the enterprise sector with the distribution by kind of activity to be again based on relative share of value added.